Reggie Miller: M.J. is 10 Times Better than Kobe

Reggie Miller isn’t impressed, though. “Michael Jordan on his worst day is 10 times better than Kobe Bryant on his best day,” the TNT announcer and three-point shooting legend recently said to Dan Patrick. “That’s not short-changing Kobe at all, because he handed me my lunch pail, too, but I will take that Black Cat (Jordan) all day, any day over Kobe.”

We can’t usually weigh too much into what legends of the past say about their old peers, or current-day players either. They’ve always got a hefty mythological stake in how people perceive their competition in the world of sports rhetoric, where legacy rules all. Every time Miller’s current co-workers Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley aim their crosshairs at men like Blake Griffin, DeMarcus Cousins and Dwight Howard, it’s not hard to see: These guys don’t want their history to be shown up.

But Miller — as he noted — isn’t defending himself or his era. Bryant and Jordan both waxed him and his otherwise-title-bound Indiana Pacers in the postseason, and he accepts that. Both were superior players to him, but one still stood much taller: Jordan.

Of course, only a time machine can really solve this dispute. And while I don’t see any DeLoreans coming around the corner, we do know that Bryant is in his eighteenth season, and has only just now equaled Jordan’s output over fifteen. Kobe, great as he’s been, can’t compare to the efficient dominance that captured basketball’s imagination so thoroughly in the ’80’s and 90’s.

While the Black Mamba is an impressive 45 percent shooter over his career (almost unheard of for a perimeter player of such high usage) Jordan was positively interstellar with his 50 percent mark.

Bryant’s accomplishment shouldn’t be diminished. He has been more committed to the sport than Jordan — who retired from the NBA three times and swung a baseball bat for a while — and that certainly counts for something. But we shouldn’t be handing Kobe the crown without context, either. So while Miller's math may be off (I'm not sure the sport could survive a player with tenfold the talent as Vino) he's surely right that His Airness still reigns supreme.